In magical Britain has raged up to the present day a debate over our nation's role in what the muggles call the Second World War, between on one end those who insist we should never have meddled, and on the other those who still regret not intervening sooner. The First World War shocked wizard observers, as it did the entire muggle world, by its brutality and futility. For winter after winter armies ground each other to dust and yet their lines never budged. But by and large the magical populations of Europe could maintain their aloofness; they could maintain their age-old tradition of leaving to muggles the affairs of muggles. They could continue to pity the muggles for their foolishness, instead of fearing them for their ruthlessness. Historians writing of Voldemort's reign of terror have compared this previous attitude to that of the great powers during their age of colonisation. They looked down upon the natives as noble savages, but who were they to claim to be civilized, who could then destroy themselves so utterly? In the Far East, which did not have this European separation of wizard from muggle, magical communities were as eager as the rest to join in the great conflicts brewing. Japan incorporated magical warfare into its campaign against Russia, while Chinese and Korean wizards took up arms against the occupying Japanese. When Europe slid into war once more, though, the wizarding world could no longer preserve its innocence. Some German wizards refused, some fled, but many joined, caught up in Hitler's vision, and many more were conscripted. The Reich made good use of these soldiers, and the curtain that fell around Europe was magical as well as military; the Jewish wizards who had not made it out by 1941 largely never did. And magical western Europe could not ignore this genocide as it had all the others. Still our Ministry tried, for as long as it could, until Albus Dumbledore could not stand by anymore and took the field himself. Then our entire society found itself inexorably drawn in to the war already raging all around us. It became clear, as this first contact between wizards and modern muggle armies proceeded, that their weaponry had developed enormously while ours had not. Fourteen Aurors were killed in a single day by German snipers in Dresden; untold numbers of Japanese wizards died in the relentless drumbeat of Allied bombings leading up to the final deadly climax. The shock wave of an atomic bomb is too fast to react to, and those who thought they had escaped proved no more resilient than the muggle victims (the discovery of the potion of radiation resistance still being some twenty years away). Faced with this unprecedented lethality, and the devastation of magical populations in all the war-torn countries, the postwar conferences swore off interventionism and focused on internal matters, such as the trial of Grindelwald. The resulting agreements declared that wizarding governments were to do anything possible to ensure that no muggle army would turn its sights on wizards ever again. Japan signed under duress, its wizarding forces forcibly demobilized by the occupation, despite its traditions; the United States shied away from making strong statements, however, as many within it had already embraced the country's new role as policeman of the world, and were aiding in its national security buildup into the Cold War. There were rumors that the same was happening in the USSR. And in the UK, a minority led by Dumbledore continued to hold that wizarding societies could not survive without muggle ones, and that even if basic human decency, even if the prevention of senseless death did not drive you to defend the muggles, self-interest should. Still, the Ministry has secured with each administration of Her Majesty's Government the strictest guarantees, in exchange for substantial favors and promises, that muggle authorities will not interfere with wizarding affairs, and will not request magical aid against muggle enemies of the state. Perhaps they are right to do so. Or perhaps they are wrong, and the muggle and magical worlds are now irreversibly intertwined, so that an obligation to one is an obligation to both. We have already seen that as Voldemort's attacks took muggle lives, their government pressured ours to take action, and though we could not in good faith refuse, the Ministry still would not admit it was all but powerless. Dumbledore has spoken of how he regrets every day he did not act against Hitler and Grindelwald. Perhaps he is right that our current path is untenable.